Friendship and Communication, Part 2

Today on Summit Life with Jiddy Greer. Nothing can replace the centrality of friendship in your marriage. Your love and commitment to your kids cannot replace the priority of your friendship with your spouse, but that's usually what happens. The center of the home is not parent and child. The center of the home is husband and wife. Welcome back to Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. As always, I'm your host, Molly Vidovich, and we're so glad that you're back with us today. You know, for a lot of us, our views on love and relationships were shaped by songs we listened to growing up or the movies we watched as a teen. Lots of feels and flowery words, right? But the reality is there's only one relationship model we should care about, and it doesn't come from Hollywood. Today on Summit Life, we're diving deep into what we're calling the friendship of marriage. We know you don't want to miss a single message here on the program, so if you're a little behind on any of this Bible-based teaching on relationships, you can always catch up at jdgreer.com. But for now, grab your Bible, take some notes, and let's join Pastor J.D.

as he continues our study in Ephesians chapter 5. So the core of marriage is friendship. I got four very practical points, right? For whether you're single, married, whatever state you're in, I think one or several of these will apply to you.

All right, so here we go. Number one, prioritize friendship in the dating process. If you are single, what are you most looking for in a spouse? You know, it's kind of a stereotype that men overvalue looks in a mate, and women overvalue earning potential. But neither of those things makes for endearing, enduring marriages. Beauty fades. You will lose your sexual appeal and your physical beauty over time.

Earning potential may or may not turn out. And even if you do get those things, neither makes for a really fulfilling relationship. But remember what I told you, marriage is not primarily romance spiced with a little friendship.

It is primarily friendship, let me change the consonant, spiked with a little romance. For you single people, let me get it all up in your business for a minute, all right? Many of you singles walk into a room and you immediately write off 80% of the people that are in that room immediately as potential marriage partners because you don't like the shape of their jaw. Or you wanted somebody who was a little bit more dark skinned. Or they have a weird part in their hair. Or they have the wrong style hair. Or they weren't an athlete in college.

Or they wear relaxed fit instead of fitted jeans. You know, none of that stuff, I'm telling you, really makes for a happy, enduring marriage. None of it. Listen to this.

This is great. Christian counselor Gary Thomas. In 1967, a study of college-age women found that 76% of women said they would have married someone, marry a man, if he had every trait they were looking for, even if they didn't feel romantic love toward them. In more recent research, 91% of women said absolutely not. That is a huge shift. Did you catch that? 1967, 76% of women said they would marry a guy if he had all the traits they were looking for, even if they didn't feel the kind of chemistry and romantic love and the tingly feeling when they looked at him.

And the other 24% were at Woodstock. Now, you see how far it's gone? 91% of girls say absolutely not, wouldn't even consider it. I've got to have that Twilight feeling when I look at him. People have been pursuing such pairings based on infatuation for several generations now, and I'm asking you to be an astute and honest observer.

How's that working out for us? I've rarely had a wife complain to me about her husband's looks. When wives come to me, it's almost always about character issues. Well, he shouldn't do this thing. He should do that thing, but he doesn't.

How do I fix this? Yet, most women are not seeking men of character first. They are seeking men with whom they feel in love. Can I tell you why most marriages are so bad? Because people have gotten through the infatuation stage and now they're bored. Because they got the idea from books or TV or country music that if you just find the person with whom you had that perfect chemistry, if the infatuation was strong enough, it would last forever. It doesn't.

It never does. But I'm telling you, if you will press through the depth of that infatuation, you will find that there is a level of thrill, there is a level of romance and intimacy and connection that comes when it's built on friendship that is beyond anything you ever experienced during that infatuation stage. If you've been around here, you've heard me tell a story. When I first saw Veronica, first time we went out, we went to class the next day, and I wrote, and the guy next to me, he was a friend, knew I'd been out with her. He's like, hey, what'd you think about her? So I reached inside of my notebook and ripped out a sheet of eight and a half by 11 paper, and I just jotted down every single adjective I could come up with to describe her.

Like 60-something different adjectives. Only one or two or three of them were about her physically. Everything else was about what we had in common and how much of a good time we had. I shoved that back in that notebook, filed away the notebook, forgot about it, until three or four years later, we're about to get married. And I'm like, hey, I want to first look at that notebook, find it, pull a sheet of paper out, had it framed, put it up in our house, all these adjectives that describe the connection I first felt with her. So that whenever she's like, why do you love me?

I'm like, it's right there on the wall. So that was what first kindled that relationship. I will admit to you that for many years in our marriage, we got away from that. And it's been fairly recently, and I don't mean like last week, but I mean like the last two or three years, that we have rediscovered the beauty of that friendship. And I will tell you now, this is not preacher talk.

This is not what I'm supposed to say. Our marriage is more thrilling and more intimate and more sweet now than it was the day after we got married. Because we pressed through the death of that infatuation, and we've dug down into more recently the friendship and the intimacy that comes out of friendship is 10 times greater than anything you ever touch with infatuation. So I'm telling you, you got to prioritize that. A couple of really practical things for you if you're single on this. First of all, if you're single, don't marry a non-Christian because you're never going to be able to share the deepest unity with that person. If you're a Christian who walks with God, the deepest part of you is the part that knows God. So don't marry a non-Christian because that means the deepest part of you, you're never going to have friendship with them in. Now, some of you are like, well, I'm married to a non-Christian now. That's okay.

You can still make it. And God has purposes for you and your marriage the way that it is. But yes, unfortunately, you're never going to be able to share the same kind of unity you could share if they loved and were committed to Jesus like you were. That doesn't mean that you should leave them because 1 Corinthians 7 tells you definitely you should not.

It just means that God has different purposes for you in the marriage, but you should pray for them that one day they will discover that deepest passion that you have because that's where the best friendship can be found. Here's one other word for you single people on this. Beware the intoxication of physical contact in dating. There are a lot of reasons that make heavy physical contact before you get married a problem, but let me give you one that's often overlooked. It will totally cloud your judgment in being able to see whether or not this person can be the kind of friend that that's what you've got to be evaluating during the dating process. And if you've got it all, if you're all strung out on the dope of infatuation, you're never going to be able to make a good value judgment. This is also, by the way, why you got to listen to your friends. Some of you right now, you're in a relationship and your friends are like, this is a bad idea. And you're like, no, it's not, but you're all strung out on infatuation.

And the problem is that drugs going to wear off. And what your friends are seeing is probably right and accurate. And God gave you your friends in order to help you see that. We have people sit in my office and they're like, and I start asking like, how did you get in this situation? Well, all my friends told me it was a bad idea. And I'm like, they were right. Weren't they?

Yeah. How come you didn't listen to him? Because I was in love. You know, I guess that's why you got here about being dumb. You know, God, I prayed about it.

God gave you something more reliable in this case than prayer. It's the wise counsel of your friends because they're not all doped up on infatuation like you were. Physical contact does nothing but infuse that drug into you so that you lose all judgment. So listen, listen, you should marry somebody with whom sex is the crowning jewel, not the centerpiece. Sex should be only like the frosting on the cupcake.

And the only way you'll be able to judge that is by keeping that drug out of the dating process. Right? And I know that ticks some of you off. I can see how you're looking at me. I'm right. Okay?

And 10 years from now, you'll come back and tell me I'm right. You can save yourself a lot of pain if you just look at what the Bible is prioritizing and learn to think about love and romance the way that God does. Here's number two. Prioritize friendship in the marriage. Prioritize friendship before the marriage. Prioritize friendship in the marriage. Nothing can replace the centrality of friendship in your marriage. If you don't prioritize the friendship, listen to me, the relationship will slowly die. Your career cannot replace the priority of your friendship with your spouse. Your love and commitment to your kids cannot replace the priority of your friendship with your spouse, but that's usually what happens. The center of the home is not parent and child.

The center of the home is husband and wife. In fact, I love Ephesians 6.4. Ephesians 6.4 basically says, raise up your kids. You know what that means? You know what that means, don't you?

Basically, it means get rid of them. Technically, the word is rear that you're supposed to use for a child, which I love that image. Rear, I get behind my kid and I just start pushing.

I'm like, get out, get out, and I launched it out into the world because the goal is to make them independent of me. God did not put a parent child in the garden. He put a husband and wife. In order for my home to be solid, my relationship with my wife has to be strong. The greatest gift I could ever give to my kids is to prioritize my friendship with my wife, even over them. Merry people, listen to me, you have got to prioritize friendship and marriage above all things. Marriage has an unparalleled power over your life. You have tied yourself emotionally, spiritually, physically, financially, you have tied yourself to another person. You become one body whether.

Because marriage has an unparalleled power in your life, it should have an unparalleled priority as well. In fact, I think about it like concentric circles. In the innermost circle is me and God. In the second circle is me and my wife. In the third circle is me and my family. In the fourth circle is me and the church. In the fifth circle is me and everybody else.

And here's what I found. When the center circles are strong, I can handle disruption in the outer circles. But when the center circles are crumbling, the slightest disturbance in the outer ones sends me into a tailspin.

I can handle just about anything when my walk with God is strong and my relationship with my wife is good. So I'm going to give priority to those relationships in that order, because those things determine the quality of my life. I've heard it said that in marriage, there are basically three kind of married relationships. There's the back to back, where a couple is essentially turned their back on each other. Maybe they live separately. Maybe they're in the same house, but they're just roommates. That's back to back. The second one is side to side.

Listen to this. That's where you work together on the house. You work together with the kids, you work together in business, you work together building a home or serving the church or whatever side by side. But the third relationship in marriage face to face. This kind of relationship is one in which in addition to the side by side work, you get a lot of face time drawing each other out in conversation, friendship and intimacy. It's the second side by side, but it's been matched by the conversation, friendship and intimacy so that you're also face to face. You're listening to Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. In many ways, our relationships with others are windows into our relationship with God, and we can only truly love others well by saturating ourselves in the truth that He first loved us. So our newest resource is focused on helping you and those you're in relationship with actually talk about deep and meaningful things. We have a set of conversation cards, which are simply cards with one question or prompt on them to pull out while you're eating dinner or on a long car ride.

They will help break the ice on difficult topics or simply give a launching pad for deeper communication. Our resource this month also includes a book of 15 devotionals about many of the topics covered in the card set. We'll send it as our thanks for your gift to the ministry right now.

So give us a call at 866-335-5220 or check it out at jdgreer.com. Now let's get back to our teaching. Here's Pastor J.D. Many of you that are married desperately need to work on number three, and you know how you're going to start doing that? Listen through simple communication.

Let me go back to what I said earlier. My wife and I did this marriage study once, and one of the assignments was just what I told you. Every day come home and tell your spouse something that happened to you that day and how you felt about it. Now men, let me just go ahead and tell you, women do this a lot more naturally than we do.

They engage each other about their feelings. My wife will go out with some woman and she will sit down over a cup of coffee and stare at her for four hours and just tell her about her feelings, right? The idea of doing that with one of you guys makes me want to throw up, okay? I just don't ever want to do that, and that's just, we're different. I get that.

I'm on your side on that, okay? So that's why I'm giving you a very simple exercise. Both of you, when you get home in the evenings, one statement to your spouse about something that happened that day and how you felt about it. Since that, here's what I started to do recently. I carry around on my little phone. I have Evernote, and I have a little Veronica card, and I just, when something makes me mad or sad or happy throughout the day, I just jot it down so that when I get home, I haven't forgotten about it, and I sit down and I just say, hey, let me go through my list with you and tell you this made me happy, this made me sad, this made me angry. All these things, I just go through it with her. She loves it. She loves it when I pull out that phone and she's like, oh, you got a list for me?

I'm like, yep, and I go through the list. I will blind copy her on a lot of emails that have nothing to do with her just because she likes to know what's going on, and she'll get a glimpse of what I'm doing that day, and it's done more to develop and foster that friendship. Now, some of you are like, well, I can see now that I made a mistake. I didn't prioritize friendship in the dating process.

I was infatuated with his looks or her looks, his earning potential. Now my spouse is not my friend. So what do I do? Well, first of all, you got a lot more in common than you probably realize. You share a home. There was some reason you fell in love to begin with.

You probably share kids. If you're Christians, you share your greatest passion. Leaving because you feel mismatched is never a biblical option. You're just going to have to work at whatever friendship you can, and you're going to have to trust God. And what you're probably going to find is that the results are better than you'd expected because I'm telling you, the power of God's grace when you obey Him and trust Him is amazing. You just start obeying God in this area, and you'll find that the results are probably far beyond what you ever dreamed or imagined. Let me do three and four real quick.

They're real short. Three, marriage is not the only place to experience friendship. In marriage, you become one body, Paul says. What's the other institution in the New Testament that's called one body? The church. You think that's incidental?

Not hardly. The church is the place that God intended for us to experience cross-gendered friendship. You see, when God created Adam and Eve, He created male and female.

Watch, this is very important. What He did is He deposited different ones of His attributes into the different genders so that they would have a longing to be reunited. That's what Adam was feeling. I longed to be reunited to the other gender because there is something in the gender that corresponds, but it's different than what is in me. Married people experience that in marriage, but if you are single, you long for that too. Even if you're content being single, you still long to be completed by the attributes that God put in the other gender, and God intended for you to experience a measure of that in the church.

Now, there are limits, of course. Married people fuse together in friendship in ways that singles in the church cannot, obviously, but the church is a place where you get another taste of that coming kingdom of which marriage is just a sign. Christ's relationship to His people. The church is the father to the fatherless because the church shows you that God's the real father. The church is the ultimate family. The church, I want to say surrogate family, the church is the real family for those that are without one in this age. That's why we say the church is the community of friends. So marriage is not the only place to experience.

Here's number four. In light of that, you should be aware of the marriage counterfeits. If marriage is ultimate, total, complete fusion of friendship, which is what it is, listen, people sometimes don't understand why sex outside of marriage is wrong. It's not hurting anybody. We're two adults making a decision. We're low. I don't get it. Why is God against this?

You actually catch a glimpse of it right here. Because sex is the ultimate fusion. You see, God, listen, designed a vulnerability in sex that would only be safe, at least in this life, with an absolute, exclusive, lifelong covenant. Sex within marriage, some of you know this by experience, sex within marriage can tear you apart.

Certainly outside of marriage, it tears you apart. Sex is like a glue that solidifies this total union of two people. It is the two genders, God having deposited different attributes and different genders, it is the two coming together as an act of oneness. Two different beings, different genders becoming one in the midst of a lifelong, exclusive covenant. Sex apart from that is not fully human. Physically, you're becoming one, but you're not one with your future.

You're not one in this lifelong covenant. So you got physical unity without the rest of the other unity. It's body without soul. That's why I call it zombie sex. Essentially, sex outside of marriage is zombie sex. It's body without a soul. So what you're doing is you're having physical unity without the rest of the unity.

Homosexual sex is an attempt at physical unity between two genders that are the same. Alastair MacIntyre is a philosopher, wrote a book called After Virtue. He said, if you want to know if something's wrong, you've got to look at the purpose for which it was designed. He said, if I wanted to hammer a nail with my watch. All right, so there's a nail, and I take my watch, and I bang on the nail, and the watch breaks.

I don't look at my watch and say, bad watch. No, it wasn't designed for that. So in order to know whether or not an action is right or wrong, you've got to look at the purpose for which it was designed. God designed sex so that it would be the completion of the two genders that he put different attributes in coming together in a lifelong covenant where they were learning to love the other that he had made opposite from them. Homosexual sex is two of the same type, the same gender coming together. That's why he says it's sinful, because it's not according to the design. It's not because God's not into variety.

It's just that like these other examples, it's a counterfeit for the real thing that doesn't serve the full extent of the purposes he has for sex. So beware the substitutes. And one more little one, okay? You married people, beware of trying to have close friends of the opposite sex who are not your spouse. And I know I'm about to get all up, and I can just, I can feel them coming.

I can feel the emails right now being typed out in your head, okay? So go ahead, but just say five positive things first, and then let me have it, all right? I'll just go ahead and say, when you get married, you should not have a lot of friends of the opposite sex. I'm friendly with a lot of people who are not my wife that are girls.

You can say I'm friends with a lot of them. But when I got married, that became my close friend, because they're just the way that God designed us. There's something about intimate friendship. I heard about a guy one time who was getting married, and his best man was a girl who he said was his best friend. And my question is, why aren't you marrying her? Because this right here is just a sex object to you.

That's all she is. This right here is a girl you should be marrying if that's your best friend. There are some of you men that are closer to some woman at your work. You share more with her emotionally than you do your spouse. There are some of you who on Facebook have a closer, tighter, more friendly relationship than you do. Let me tell you why it's easy to do that, because they don't have to deal with all the other junk.

You get to choose what parts. You don't become actually one body with them. Emotional adultery.

Listen to this. Emotional adultery, which almost always leads to actual adultery. Emotional adultery is being better friends with somebody the opposite sexier than you are with your spouse. And you've got to beware that, because I'm telling you that is just, I mean, it is not casual. Beware the marriage substitutes.

Friendship is one of the most crucial but most overlooked dimensions of marriage. And I know I've given you a lot here, but I'm hoping you'll just chew on it. And I've given you an activity. Again, come home each day this week with one thing and how you felt about it. When something gets you emotionally, man, write it down. By the way, again, not about them. That's a different conversation for a later time. Here's what you did that made me mad. Here's what you did that made me mad. Here's what you did that made me madder.

That's later, okay? This is things that you just experienced that made you just do that. Open yourself up. I hope you realize that the pattern and power for all of this is Jesus. That's more than just a cliche. You see, Jesus is the source of love. He is the source of friendship.

He is the best of all friends, because not only did he become one body with you and fill your pain, he actually took your pain into his body and died on a cross for it and put it away. And the way that you learn to love somebody else is being loved by him. That's why we call it the love triangle. Jesus at the top, you and your spouse or the person you love over here. And I'm telling you is the closer you get to Jesus, the more you will find you love each other, the closer you get to each other.

Just think of it like moving up the legs of that triangle. Because as you get closer to Jesus, you get close to the source and you begin to love your spouse, love that boyfriend or girlfriend, the way that you have been loved. And as you grow in your awareness of his love for you, it just comes out naturally. You see, the reason that some of you, your marriages are so bad is that you're disconnected from the source of love. You're disconnected from God.

The foundation is not there. The root has been severed. And so that's why the plant of your marriage is dying. What you need to do is to be reconnected to God. Being reconnected to God through the gospel will do more for your marriage and family than a hundred sermons or seminars on marriage. Do you need to reconnect with God?

If so, let me encourage you to learn more about what it means to be a follower of Christ. We have lots of resources to get you started and help you grow. Just visit jdgrier.com. You're listening to Summit Life with pastor, author, and theologian, J.D.

Greer. It's because of your partnership that others around the country and even the world can hear God's truth every day. So when you give a financial gift of $35 or more, we'll say thanks by sending you our brand new 15-day resource called Devotions for the Distracted Family. As I mentioned earlier, it also comes with a set of 20 conversation cards. Our goal is to keep you and those you're closest with talking and communicating about important things like faith, relationships, and even rest. We all live in a distracted world, so we want to set you up for success facilitating deeper conversations that build stronger friendships. We've created these devotionals to provide encouragement for anyone who feels distracted and even disconnected at times. And the conversation cards can help kickstart meaningful conversations. They have a single question or prompt to help keep your family and friends talking around the dinner table about things that truly matter. Request these resources today when you call 866-335-5220.

That's 866-335-5220 or donate online at jdegreer.com. I'm Molly Vidovich. Tomorrow we will tackle the sometimes inevitable byproduct of deep friendship, conflict.

How do we do it well? Join us tomorrow for Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.